What is becoming visible across different countries today does not return in the shape of classical fascism. It does not necessarily march in uniforms, does not always repeat the old slogans, and does not require an openly totalitarian state to be effective. It appears more quietly. It comes as a tone of voice, as exhaustion, as hardening, as a taste for humiliation, as a cold readiness to sacrifice the dignity of others to one’s own emotional impulse. That is precisely why the concept of “existential fascism” is so precise: it designates not merely an ideology, but a psychic and cultural form in which the self absolutizes itself and the common world disintegrates (Morán, 2025).

One of the great political mistakes is to wait for fascism to arrive in full costume. By then, it is already too late. The more important question comes earlier: What psychic disposition prepares the ground? The answer is uncomfortably simple. It is the idolization of the self in an age of lost trust. When institutions are hollowed out, when language empties, when social bonds weaken, and when the future no longer appears as a shared promise but only as a private threat — then the desire for hardness grows. Not because hardness heals reality, but because it gives the destabilized self the feeling of still existing. Politics stops asking what is true and starts offering something easier: relief. A place to dump fear, rage, humiliation. (Arendt, 1951; Fromm, 1941; Adorno et al., 1950).

In the United States, this shift has become particularly visible. On February 23, 2026, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic — not the crude claim that all Republicans are Nazis. His argument was more precise, and therefore sharper: the Republican Party has become a space in which slogans, codes, and rhetorical figures associated with fascism, or even with the Third Reich, are no longer decisively rejected. His point is not: identity = Nazism. It is: the normalization of a political vocabulary that once would have been treated as an uncrossable line. That is where the structural shift lies. It is not only the fringe that radicalizes — the center loses its capacity for rejection (Nichols, 2026).

The same pattern appears in Europe not as a copy, but as a family resemblance. Radical right parties are in many countries no longer mere fringe phenomena but actors with growing influence over political agendas, public language, and the formation of governments. They differ in history, style, and national context. But they share common instincts: politics of enmity, distrust of liberal mediating institutions, the heroization of national assertion, and the........

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